Heart of a Child

The story of how I learned to play the guitar is a fun one. At the time, I was in the youth group at Kingsfield Church. My friend Cece and I discovered that both of us wanted to learn to play the guitar, so we thought we could try together. On of our fellow students knew how to play, so we decided to draft a letter of proposal to ask him to teach us.

We used our fanciest English to write a proposal letter in the format of the New Testament epistles. I wish I could find that letter; it was amazing and hilarious now. Basically, this is what we said: “If you teach us how to play the guitar, we’ll pay you with baked goods each week.”

Being a high school boy, he, of course, accepted. My sister jumped on our bandwagon, and soon the three of us were learning guitar every week.

Once I knew sufficient chords, I had a brief song-writing phase. Let me tell you, I’m a rubbish song writer. Really, I don’t know what I was thinking. But I just stumbled upon my songs, and realized that some of their lyrics, with a little tweaking, make passably good poems. So I’d like to share one with you.

When I reread this one, it struck me that, though I wrote it when I was in high school, I’m going through the exact same things now that I was then. Then, last night, the topic of what it means to come to Jesus as a little child came up. So, this is very relevant to my life right now:

Heart of a Child

I go through my day, my week, my life.
The pressures rise, my stress goes up.
At night, I lie sleepless; at daybreak, I rise.
The cycle starts again.

Flip past the newsmongers who glory in strife.
My heart sinks lower as tragedy shoots up.
When I seek God’s truth, the enemy shouts lies.
We are separate again.

Give me the heart of a child so I can sing praises
To the One above
And delight in creation with awe for the Name of
The One who fills me up.

So this is what He means when He said,
“My kingdom belongs to such as
These.” Little children, show us how,
How to live again.